At present, in the field of wireless networks, Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) develops rapidly, and application demands for the WLAN are continuously increasing. In an Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) 802.11 set, a series of standardized common WLAN technologies such as 802.11a, 802.11b and 802.11g are defined in sequence, and other task groups, dedicated to development of specifications involving technical improvements on the existing 802.11 standards, emerge one by one. Among these task groups, the 802.11ah task group is dedicated to develop a WLAN network air interface standard for adopting license-free bands under 1 GHz, aiming at offering support for new network applications such as a smart power grid and a sensor network.
A Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance (CSMA/CA) of the WLAN enables a plurality of stations share a wireless channel. When a station obtains an access grant of the wireless channel and sends a radio frame to another station, the former station may require the latter station to feed back an acknowledgement (ACK) radio frame. When a station successfully receives a radio frame sent thereto and the radio frame requires feedback of an ACK radio frame, the station sends an ACK radio frame after a fixed interframe space (interframe interval).
Meanwhile, the WLAN also supports a virtual carrier detection method, that is, a station maintains a local Network Allocation Vector (NAV), which decreases with time. When a radio frame not intended for a receiving station is received, the receiving station updates the local NAV according to a value in a DURATION domain of the received radio frame. When the local NAV is not zero, the station cannot compete for a channel to perform data transmission. Before sending data, the station needs to check whether the local NAV thereof is zero. The station needs to check a local NAV state unless the station successfully receives a radio frame and an ACK frame is required.
As shown in FIG. 1, according to a current data sending feedback solution, an ACK frame indicating successful receiving may be returned only when a receiver successfully receives a radio frame. When the sender does not successfully receive the ACK frame within appointed time, it will be regarded that the previous radio frame is unsuccessfully sent. This method does not support sending of a feedback frame indicating failure, and a sender cannot learn a receiving situation of the radio frame in time.
An effective solution is not proposed yet for the above-mentioned problems in the related art.